history-teacher.co.uk collates free, useful content for history teachers in one place. It's aimed at secondary-school teachers and trainees in the UK specifically, though plenty of it will be useful more widely too.
Everything here is gathered from other people's work, not written or submitted here, nothing on this site is original reporting, opinion, or user-submitted content, beyond the code that fetches, ranks, and (in one place) summarises it. Below, more about the different things on the site.
The reason this exists: the alternative is a stack of newsletters and a folder of bookmarks, each one needing a few minutes to work out whether anything in it actually matters today. That sifting is time a teacher doesn't get back. The idea is one place that's already done it, so following anything else becomes a deliberate choice for what matters most, not another subscription kept out of habit.
The ethos behind it is unhindered access: content that's free not only in the sense of costing nothing, but in the sense that accessing it never requires creating an account or handing over any personal details.
ed-brief is a daily-updated news briefing for history teachers and trainees: ranked and summarised so you don't have to wade through dozens of email newsletters or irrelevant articles. Only news from sites that aren't paywalled is included, so you can always read the full article, and an item drops off the list once it's more than two weeks old.
The list is also available as an RSS feed, and there's a weekly digest (AI-written) if you'd rather read a written round-up than scan a list, plus an archive of every past day's brief.
Every story is checked against a fixed set of keywords and known-relevant sources. An AI model then scores the headline and content against a rubric of around 20 criteria for relevance to a history teacher or trainee in the UK, some universal to every story (how much actually changes, how easy this would be to find without a curated brief), others specific to what kind of story it is. The two scores are blended into one relevance figure, which decides which of four groups a story lands in:
ed-brief grew out of a personal project for one Nottinghamshire history teacher, and that's still part of how it works: stories specifically about Nottinghamshire history, heritage, or schools are actively sought out, flagged with a Notts pill, and always placed in at least the "Everything else" band, whatever they score against the rubric above. If you're not in Nottinghamshire and would rather not see these, there's a "Hide Notts" toggle in the filters, alongside a "Notts only" one for the opposite case.
25 sources are currently checked for new content once a day: national and education-sector news, government and regulator publications (DfE, Ofsted, Ofqual), university education and history departments, subject associations, heritage and archive organisations, and individual historians' and teachers' own blogs. A story is judged on its own content, not by which of these it came from. This list isn't exhaustive, there will always be good sources it hasn't found yet.
A directory of other sites offering free history teaching resources, lesson materials, source collections, activity packs. Links only: this site doesn't sort, rate, or assess the quality of what's inside each one, just points to it (see the disclaimer below). This list isn't exhaustive either. See the list →
A simple way to suggest a source or a resource, report a broken link, or just say hi, not built yet.
Currently updated once a day. Each pair of coffees bought via Ko-fi funds one more daily refresh, added to the schedule for the following year.
Read state and saved articles that follow you between devices, not just the browser you're on.
A way to keep specific articles beyond the normal retention window, instead of losing them when they expire.
ed-brief and the resources list are meant to be the first of a small set of free tools for history teachers on this site, not the only ones.
This site runs no analytics and no tracking of any kind. The only thing it remembers is which articles you've marked read, stored in your own browser's local storage, never sent anywhere, and not shared between devices or browsers. Your read articles will still be there if you come back on the same browser and device later, but not on a different one.
Every external link this site publishes or pulls from, the resources list and every news source alike, is checked monthly for reachability and staleness (see the Resources section above). The same check also runs every link against Google's Safe Browsing service for known malware and phishing sites; anything it flags is a hard stop, removed from the resources list immediately and excluded from what gets fetched.
history-teacher.co.uk is not responsible for the content of the sites it links to or aggregates from, that's each publisher's own work, not this site's. Every story and resource is checked for relevance to a history teacher or trainee in the UK, not filtered by opinion and not assessed for quality, accuracy, or rigour. Inclusion here is not an endorsement of anything a linked site says.